Contents

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Sign-offs

-- Should they carry the @thomsonreuters.com email address? This is the address the recipient of an email sees when we email them so suggest they should use this rather than @reuters.com

-- Asia Desk is telling Asian bureaux the order of contact details has changed so phone number goes at the end. If so, please adjust the entry in the operations guide to match.

Realise this is not the most riveting of subjects but it would be good to have clarity so journalists can
set up a saved string and go back to worrying about the content of their stories.

Regards

Rodney Joyce

kph or km/h

Declaration of Interest:
The author is a member of the United Kingdom Metrication Association and is otherwise a software engineer in the TR Financials section.

Comments:
The Reuters style guide mandates the use of “kph” as an abbreviation for “kilometres per hour”. The author suggests that Reuters should mandate the use of the *symbol* “km/h”.

One of the tenants of the metric system (or SI to give it its official short name) is that it should, as far as possible, be international. SI is administered by an inter-governmental organisation called the International Bureau for Weights and Measures. Amongst other things it hold the prototype kilogram on behalf of those countries who have signed up and it publishes recommendations on how to write SI units. In the case of kilometres per hour, it recommends that the symbol “km/h” be used. This convention is also recommended by ISO-31.

The symbol “km/h” is used universally even though the local text for “kilometres per hour” might be “Kilometer pro Stunde” (German), “Chilometri all’ora” (Italian), “quilómetros por hora” (Portuguese) or “kilometrów na godzinę” (Polish).

May I respectfully suggest that the Reuters guide follow the international standard rather than the UK tabloid’s standard.

Megawatts

The author is a part time “A” Level physics tutor.

The style guide's entry on megawatts reads “The capacity of a power station is measured in megawatts and its output in megawatt hours.” This is incorrect. It should read “The instantaneous input or output of a power station is measured in megawatts (MW) and the cumulative output in megawatt hours (MWh)”

There is a direct analogy with the following statement “The instantaneous performance of a motor car is its speed and its cumulative performance is the distance it has covered”.

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you would like any further explanation.

Martin Vlietstra (54967)

Negative Temperatures

In the section entitled "Temperature" you had the text "minus 15C". Since you do not write "Two hundred and 42", surely you should write "-15C".